Terrorism-Lite: How Universities Let Students Abuse Academic Freedom

Why are some students doing this? Because they can. No one is stopping them. There is no accountability and no cost -- either to them or to the people failing to educate them. Bad behavior is rewarded; it is allowed to go on.

Will self-declared jihadis and other "speech police" decide what is, and what is not, allowed to be discussed and taught in Western universities?

Is education now about instilling fear?

The first amendment right should not extend to depriving others of their first amendment right.

What criteria had the professor used -- and for that matter Europe -- to determine that Hamas was not a terrorist group, as opposed to the criteria used by the government of the United States to determine that, in fact, it was?

Academic freedom in the West is usually a given -- or was.

Recently, however, American universities have been allowing students to shout down speakers, "disinvite" others, and punish -- or threaten to punish -- students simply for respectfully expressing their views. These curtailments of academic freedom and free speech place apparently take place without any consequences for those who curtail, agitate or disrupt. Ironically, often the very people who shut down free speech are treated as free speech heroes.

The latest display of (repeated) extremely questionable, if not illegal, judgment by a college administration involved an academic assault by the Dean of Students at Brandeis University, Jamele Adams, on an honor-roll senior, Daniel Mael.[1] "They try," Mael said, "to intimidate students into being silent, in the interest of people's feelings not being hurt, rather than encourage debate."

These problems, unfortunately, seem to be widespread. Academic freedom, although sometimes abused, was originally provided, including tenure, to give scholars the right to communicate ideas freely, without retaliation, even if these ideas are sometimes viewed as "inconvenient."

Recently, however, there has been a change. Academic freedom in the West has been shrinking to a point where in places it barely exists. Students, chosen so carefully, supposedly come to learn, but lately seem to have been trying to take over the house -- too often, sadly, with the complicity of the administrations.

Speakers are not only "disinvited," they are shouted into silence or swooshed off the stage. Who is allowing this behavior?

At a University of Massachusetts Amherst rally even a few years ago, you could see the hatred and rage in the eyes of the cowardly, masked demonstrators calling for the destruction of Israel. Many were obviously not students at all, and many not young and impressionable. They seemed to have been brought in just to yell slogans and frighten everyone.

Many, however, who did appear to be students, based on what was said had no knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but seemed to have come just to demonstrate against Israel. Many even seemed good, overachieving children from liberal, upper middle class homes, who had just tagged along, but had no idea what to do in the face of genuine threats of violence. They seemed mostly worried about their grades.

This time, however, on a recent book tour through North America, there were guards in the hall, "to keep order," they said.

"Why would you need to 'keep order?'" I said. "Is this some East Asian dictatorship?"

They said that at times opposition groups started violent demonstrations, either to make sure that events did not take place; or, if they did, to silence the speaker and frighten everyone in the university so that no one holding those views would ever speak there again.

It was censorship, it was authoritarian, and it was not what you would expect in the West from a place of higher learning, or any learning.

On October 29, 2013, a lecture at Brown University by New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly (center, behind the podium at the front of the room) was abruptly cut-off and cancelled after unruly protesters repeatedly interrupted Kelly's speech and would not stop. (Image source: Brown Daily Herald YouTube screenshot)

That view was seen again -- this time with threats of violence -- when a well-known Muslim professor, from a respected American university, said he would like to publish an article together about young Muslims involved in terrorism, but that he was afraid to use the word "terrorism" because he and his family could be harmed or ostracized, and his daughter might never find a husband.

So despite agreeing on the theme, we eventually had to agree that there was no way we could report any of the findings without placing him in danger. To avoid publishing lies, we chose to abandon the project. He feared for his life. In America.

Another odd welcome took place at the University of Florida in Gainesville, at a talk on the participation of women and children in terrorism.

The audience was assured that, as a criminologist, I would not be discussing any political issues, but instead would talk about the psychological effects of gender discrimination and how they related to increasing radical Islamic terrorism.

There were two short films first, one from Pakistan and the other from Iraq, on how young girls were tempted into marriage and "sacrifice" (shahada); and on the massive use of women and children in the terrorism industry.

But a few minutes into the talk, a group of students (judging from how they looked, not all of them may have been students) walked towards the stage and sat in the front row.

The woman wore traditional Islamic dress, with her face fully covered; the men wore jeans and torn leather jackets. After a short while, they stood up, turned around, and unbuttoned their outer clothing to reveal pro-jihad and anti-Israel signs, which they held up; they then began shouting, waving their signs and jeering at the students, who by then seemed terrified into silence.

The group had probably come to disrupt a "demonic" Israeli, and because speaking about terrorism upset them.

They would be better off, I said, demonstrating in Syria, where terrorists were gassing and slaughtering women and children.

That was not, apparently, what they had expected. They looked at each other, then hurried out of the hall.

When the audience settled down, a student asked if I had been scared. I explained that after more than twenty years of going to prisons in Israel to interview serial terrorist murderers, I had worse things to contend with than people interrupting my talks.

They explained that such tactics were often used there, and that most of the time the lecture was cut short and people went home.

So, under the cloak of free speech, gangs of thugs in North America have apparently been silencing free speech in many universities. Where previously pluralism and freedom of thought were all-important, they were spreading hate propaganda.

It was unsettling that it took someone from a foreign country to preserve their right to know, but what was really frightening was seeing the erosion of academic freedom in such a great democracy. Do speakers now need security details? Will the academic calendar be arranged to suit the fancy of whoever is trying to silence opinions that they might disagree with? Is education now about instilling fear?

Will self-declared jihadis and other "speech police" decide what is, and what is not, discussed and taught in Western universities? Where are the university authorities? Why do they not simply expel whoever is intolerant of academic values? No one is forcing these students to be there. They may be enjoying their free speech, but they are not allowing others to enjoy their free speech. The first amendment right should not extend to depriving others of their first amendment right.

Why are these students behaving this way? Because they can. People are letting them. There is no accountability and no cost -- either to them or to the people failing to educate them. Bad behavior is rewarded; it is allowed to go on.

Do the universities not have the means to protect their students and, more importantly, their institutions? Why are these hapless administrators not dismissed?

At another well-known university near Washington, D.C., a student said that one of her professors had told her Hamas was not a terrorist organization. One had to wonder if this professor actually knew anything about Hamas -- not just its activities and its agenda to destroy Israel -- but to kill all the Jews -- and how it was striving night and day to achieve those ends. What criteria had the professor -- and for that matter, much of Europe -- used to determine that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, as opposed to the criteria used by the government of the United States to determine that, in fact, it was?

There is, however, room for hope. There were also many Muslim students who had fled the catastrophes brought about by Islamist radicalism. After one talk, a student named Muhammad said his family had run from Somalia in fear of al-Shabaab. Jihadist ideas, he said, had penetrated the madrasas [religious Islamic schools] of Somalia, which had historically followed Sufi Islam (a spiritual, more peaceful version). He regretted, he said, that the greatest victims of radical Islamist terrorism were the Muslims themselves.

A Syrian student, smiling, said that all humanity had the same enemy.

After another talk in South Florida, in an auditorium packed with both faculty and students, an aging professor from Tunisia spoke up. "At school in Tunis, we had both Jewish and Christian teachers who enriched my intellectual curiosity. But look at what happened to us," he said. "We got lost."

An Afghan student told us how his family fled from the Taliban; he said that the wave of extreme Islamic murder had to be stopped.

Local students came over. Universal humanism and common sense were being challenged by ignorance and coercion, they said, and advanced by threats of violence.

One should not have to say that universities should be protected sanctuaries, and not lawless theaters for terrorism-lite.

Administrators faced with authoritarian pressures urgently need to ask what they can do to preserve free speech and free thought.

There is a real danger that idealistic but naïve students -- usually oscillating between too much confidence and not enough -- are being pounded from all sides: by peer-pressure; by the wish to be popular; by censorship from without and within; by "political correctness" and by radical Islam. These students are coerced into joining any groupthink at the door without ever seeing how manipulated they are.

Dr. Anat Berko conducts research for the National Security Council and is a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. A criminologist, she is author of two books: The Path to Paradise, and The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers.

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17 Reader Comments

Dean • Jan 26, 2015 at 18:52

I would advise students graduating from high school to get a trade or attend a community college rather than a university. The costly education delivered by universities everywhere has become polluted with leftism, subjectivity and ignorance. A community college might also harbor the same kinds of vacuous, censorious creeps but at least the curriculum is a bit further removed from the socialism and Islamism that is inculcated in universities. The universities are also incubators of abuse by over-paid propagandists who have been coddled to death by institutions that refuse to monitor their classroom performance and the introduction of modern versions of totalitarianism and unsubstantiated nonsense.

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Rowan Shann • Jan 7, 2015 at 22:25

Over the last 100 years, perhaps 150 years, in western culture 'Modernism' and 'Higher Criticism' have steadily eroded people's belief in the Omnipotence of God. If you no longer believe that the Lord God is our Creator and is Omnipotent, you no longer attach absolute value to the Commandments He gave us for our way of life. Academics were in the forefront of this erosion of belief. The line of approach to them was "Surely you are too intelligent to believe....." In droves they responded "I AM too intelligent to believe...." If you can no longer see absolutes of Right and Wrong you become 'tolerant'. Tolerance - of everything - in time becomes Anarchy. This article indicates that we are on the threshold of this stage now. Heaven help us all!

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Peter • Jan 7, 2015 at 18:29

Why is it that a few noisy, obnoxious disruptors "terrorize" a frequently much larger group of moderate people in the audience? If the administration is too cowardly to call in security or the police, can't the audience intervene?
As for administrators, I remember a wonderful photo of S. Hayakawa, then the president of San Francisco State, who was prevented from speaking to a student demonstration (about who knows what?) by noise from a loudspeaker truck yapping away. He climbed up on the truck bed and tore out the electrical connections to the amplifiers. Then he proceeded to say what he wanted to say.What a contrast to the gutless wonders of the 21st century.

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Jeff • Jan 6, 2015 at 22:37

There is no true academia anymore. It's indoctrination and the perpetuation of false narratives which only support Marxist philosophy. All of our universities have become havens for Marxist indoctrination. This should be considered the greatest threat to individual freedom and actual justice in our society.

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Tony Papafilis • Jan 6, 2015 at 21:40

The freedom revolution of the 60s is now recognised as a con job. The freedom to tear down old mores and values allowed the anti-western, socialist inspired types to take over institutions and impose a socialist minded dictatorship that is wrecking western societies.

The decent, sensible citizens have to wait for a conservative leader with courage to lead the counter revolution against them. Alas, there is no such leader currently in sight.

In Australia, our conservative government promised to tear up the laws that are used by political minorities to dictate and impinge on freedom of speech of the majority. The government cowered under pressure from, amongst others, the Muslim community leaders who subsequently objected to tougher anti-terrorism laws.

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Mike Briggs • Jan 6, 2015 at 19:24

...with 'Free Speech' ruffians like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), ostensibly protesting the war in Vietnam. Sesu Hayakawa, President at Sacramento State shut it down at his place and was rewarded with a 'promotion' to US Senator by the appreciative folks of California. But much has changed in California and Academia since, and we find the most intolerant, bigoted and naïve folks on the planet in control of both those places today!

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mary cheah • Jan 6, 2015 at 19:07

Keep spreading the facts; people need to be educated.Fact is that these people are of one single (simple) mind, brain washed by their Ideology.It is the easiest thing to just follow without questioning what they are being told. Women are being used and abused...that is FACT. EDUCATION must be spread to overcome the hatreds, caused by IGNORANCE.

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rodney alsworth • Jan 6, 2015 at 17:57

quote- Why are these students behaving this way? Because they can. People are letting them. There is no accountability and no cost -- either to them or to the people failing to educate them. Bad behaviour is rewarded;-. people are letting them, huh, the people who are letting them are those in Authority, that's where the problem begins, and you say - BECAUSE THEY CAN-, now this is important to all of us to understand, the - they can - must surely remind us that society today has allowed their children to - do as they want-, now this is the breeding ground for this generation that wants everything now without cost to them and they never really grow to maturity of character - BECAUSE THEY DONT HAVE TO -.WHY YOU ASK, because we have allowed them to get away with it without making them responsible for their words and actions., bringing responsible adult behaviour and maturity into this world will only happen when the -now-adult world looks at the crop of the younger generations and gets honest with themselves.rod qld aust

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Rabbi Menashe • Jan 6, 2015 at 12:42

Islamist Israel haters and terrorist supporters have been very clever in their efforts to pollute the intellectual environment on university campuses. There has been since the 60's a tolerated and even admired niche on university campuses for the "protestor". This is a relic of the organized opposition to the wrong headed involvement of the U.S. in the "Vietnam War". The protestor stood up and with signs and voice raised a ruckus about an unpopular war that college age young men were being drafted to fight in a far away land without clear objectives. In protest administration buildings were temporarily taken over. There were "sit ins", rallies and marches. Representatives of the military were heckled with anti-war slogans. Faculty often took part in these protests. Because there is a consensus that the whole Vietnam adventure, if you could call it that was wrong, those who opposed it today are viewed positively as are their actions in protest.

The Islamists and Israel haters have molded their narrative to falsely take the moral high ground that the anti-Vietnam war protestors held. They have occupied that tolerated and admired campus niche. Combined with the "political correctness" and multiculturalism that informs and guides the thoughts and actions of so many university administrators and faculty today has given the supporters and enablers of Muslim terrorism a powerful tool to control debate and discussion on university campuses across the country.

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Peter Mahs • Jan 6, 2015 at 12:28

Video recordings should be made and available to the Administrators of the Colleges. Thugs should be expelled if the recordings show thug behavior. Educators should also be video taped and judged accordingly. Tenure should be abolished.

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Winifred Drell • Jan 6, 2015 at 11:39

No one seems to comment on past history. Why? Is the past irrelevant? I was taught that is how we learn.

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steven L • Jan 6, 2015 at 10:55

If the government does not intervene, and there is evidence that the Obama administration is engaged in a war against free speech, it should then be the responsibility of the US congress to put its foot down and defund any institution engaged in the suppression of the 1st amendment.In the EU the authorities have taken the side of curtailing free speech and that is already leading to catastrophic consequences that we see: silencing of society, increased violence, rape, murders, anti-semitism.Is the EU victim of its dependence on gas, oil and markets from the Islamic world?

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Carl • Jan 6, 2015 at 09:45

These are the future leaders of our country? They are evidently being educated by people who also have no idea of reality. They have been indoctrinated into the mindset that only their opinions matter and close your minds to everything else. Maybe it is time for an independent board to screen professors before they are hired because the existing system is not working. In my generation we were taught that the ability to think was even more important than the actual subjects being taught. Our free thinkers are dying off and are not being replaced.

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RussGee • Jan 6, 2015 at 06:52

So terribly disappointed that the land of the brave and home of the free might have to change the words of their National Anthem. Freedom in the Universities in the USA and in Europe too has all but disappeared. With this attitude it's no wonder that the Arab Nations are producing nothing but fear, failure and more failure. The Universities themselves have lost Academic Freedom, have become cowardly and have given up their right and ability to stand up for what they were originally established. Great names like Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Brandeis etc are not a shadow of what they were and what they need to be. Giving in to terrorists who do nothing for the world of Academia could take us back to the dark ages. Where are yesterday's Heroes?

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TheSnail • Jan 6, 2015 at 06:49

The action by these groups trying to suppress free speech, is evidence that they have no good arguments for their cause. It is also evidence that they intend to 'spike the guns' of those who have any argument against their ideas. This is because they subscribe to an ideology which they regard as immutable for all times and circumstances.Their ideology cannot therefore evolve so there is no room for discussion. This attitude of mind is completely at odds with Western democracy. While at the same time they wish to receive the benefits of a culture which was produced as a result of open discussion, they wish to suppress any discussion. You cannot however have it both ways - the benefits, and suppression of the system that produces those benefits. It is to be regretted greatly that the authorities at the Universities in question, are willing to kowtow to these ideologues who are undermining the very foundations of their so called academic institutions.

This is not only going on in US campuses but all over the world, especially in Europe. It is going on at the level of academic organizations and conferences where Israeli professors are marginalized or not invited and anti-Israeli propaganda is favored. It is also going on in the media when every little thing Israel does is demonized and the true evil countries of the world are given a pass to do as they please. I strongly suggest that parents who are paying huge college/university tuitions start calling the administrations and start forcing them to keep their universities safe places of learning and peaceful communication.